Internet Marketing, Web Technologies & News – Best Web Ezy

Last post we talked about on-page SEO.  Let’s talk about the other half – off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is really refering to link building.  As you probably would know, search engines counts the links pointing to a website as votes to its importance.  The more links pointing to it, the more important the site is, hence the PageRank would increase accordingly.

To qualify for a high PageRank, it is important to:

1. Obtain natural links – make sure your links are not ‘bulk buy’ links from crap sites or link farms.  (One saying is that you can’t really control who links to you, so Google can’t really penalize you.  Well, that’s true.  But still, try to avoid anyway.)

2. Obtain links from relevant websites – if you sell cars, you may want your link is from automobile related sites.

3. No pay links – search engines don’t really like paid links.  If you want to buy links, well, it is not encouraged.

Quality of the links are more important than quantity.  But quantity is also very important.

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Recently I have blogged about John Chow’s contest for Market Leverage.  And then John Cow’s contest, also for Market Leverage. They pretty much have the same system to attract you to join.

Contests, contests, contests… Have you ever thought of why there are suddenly so many contests happening?

Market Leverage, John Chow, John Cow and many others are doing this for a few reasons:

Increase number of Comments

John Chow asked us to leave a comment to gain the first ticket to enter the contest.  A large number of comments surely reflects the popularity of the blog.

RSS / Email Subscription

To gain another ticket, they have asked you to subscribe to their RSS feed.  That is an effective way to increase their number of subscribers.

SEO – Link Building

To gain extra tickets, you have to blog about the contest linking to John’s.  By specifying the link text they have gained a quality / juicy backlink, which search engines count for ranking.

They have also asked to link to Market Leverage.  Again, another juicy link, but this one is to ML instead.

Affiliate Marketing

To gain more tickets, you have to sign up with Market Leverage using a referral link.  This way when you earn money through ML, they would get a commission.

What have you gained?

By placing a comment on their popular blog you have also gained yourself a link.  If you have put your targeted key phrases onto the link then you got a higher quality link.  I am not sure if they have got nofollow enabled though.

And of course, you have gained more chances to win the present!

At the time of writing, John Chow has gained 712 comments and John Cow got 74 (oops big difference).  That effectively means they would have gained a large number of links as well.

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Yes, you have read the title right.  Microsoft is going to launch their own social bookmarking site. Apart from Live bookmark.

A preview version should be available for MSDN and TechNet in a very short time (probably within a few days).

Not a surprise – this new social bookmarking site allows users to:

• Bookmark a site on the web
• Tag it
• Bookmark a site on the upcoming “My bookmark” tool

Why is there another social bookmarking site?  MS reveals that the new site should open another stream of advertising income, and also to collect tag data to improve search result relevancy.

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If you do link building, then directory submission is one essential component of it.  However, there are millions of directories on the internet.  Which ones to choose?

You can decide which directories to choose base on a few factors.

1. Google PageRank- although many people don’t really see it as important, it is however a good indication of how search engines view the directory website.  The higher the PageRank, the better.  When you submit, you may also want to have a look at the PageRank of the particular page / category that you are submitting to.

2. Ranking of the directory – type in a few keywords like ‘internet directory’, ‘business directory’, ‘online directory’, or ‘[your niche] directory’ and see what comes up on the first few pages of search results.

3. Relevancy – as I mentioned before, the links from websites with higher relevancy are more important.

4. Link verification – it is better of the verification process is manual.  Usually the auto-processed directories are likely to attract spams.

5. Site quality – have a look at the websites on the directory and see if they are poor quality sites.

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We talked about link building. We talked about building links fast. But one more factor affects your link building effort – they have to be good links.

To define good links, they have to be:

1. From a website relevant to your topic. If you have a jockey club website and asking for a link from a web designer, it is less valued. If you are a web designer asking for a link from a web host, then it is probably considered a better link.

2. From government and educational websites. It is generally believed that links from .gov or .edu links are better.

3. From a page with less links. Try to ask for a link placement on a page with less than 10 links. And of course, higher pagerank.

4. Key phrase rich. Something you see very often: click here, buy now, www.website.com etc doesn’t help. Search engines wants to know what is on the website that it is linked to, and to do so, they read the anchor text.

Don’t get a software that submits 5,000 links for you in one single click. It is not going to do any good for you. In fact, you site might be banned by search engines if you do so.

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